Crypto Phishing Losses Plunge 83% in 2025, But ‘Whale Hunting’ Attacks Rise

Reported losses from cryptocurrency phishing assaults plummeted 83% in 2025, falling to roughly $84 million from practically $494 million the earlier 12 months.

According to a brand new annual report by Web3 safety agency Scam Sniffer, incidents of “signature phishing” look like declining. However, the agency warned that this seen drop masks a darker underlying actuality of extra subtle actors.

Data Shows Phishing Losses Tracking Crypto Market Cycles

The annual report reveals a robust correlation between fraud and market volatility. Phishing exercise peaked in the third quarter, ensuing in losses of $31 million.

This surge coincided with the 12 months’s strongest Ethereum price rally. During this era, ETH’s value rallied to close $5000 amid sturdy institutional curiosity in the digital asset.

The developments assist the view that fraud behaves as a likelihood operate of person exercise, increasing as retail participation will increase.

While the whole quantity of assaults declined, the lethality of particular person incidents elevated late in the 12 months. In November, the variety of victims fell by 42%, but whole monetary losses spiked 137%.

This anomaly signifies that subtle attackers are abandoning low-value targets to deal with high-net-worth people, with the typical loss per sufferer rising sharply to $1,225 throughout that interval.

This anomaly alerts a bifurcation in the risk panorama. Criminal teams are pivoting from mass-market spam to “whale looking,” deploying subtle, focused assaults geared toward high-net-worth people.

At the identical time, technological upgrades inside the crypto business additionally launched new vulnerabilities.

For context, the attackers shortly weaponized Ethereum’s “Pectra” upgrade, particularly exploiting EIP-7702.

This function, designed to enhance the person expertise through account abstraction, was leveraged to bundle multiple malicious operations right into a single signature, ensuing in over $2.5 million in losses in August alone.

Scam Sniffer additionally identified that the whole losses from these assaults might be considerably increased.

According to the agency, it tracked solely on-chain signature scams and excluded losses from clipboard malware, social engineering, and direct non-public key compromises.

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